Extreme Ice Survey imagery is expertly brought to life on the silver screen.

There has been a growing buzz about a new climate change documentary Chasing Ice, which won a pile of film festival awards and is now on the Oscars short list (one of only 15 documentaries). I finally got the chance to catch it at a local theater and, although I went in with high expectations, I had them exceeded.

To be engaging, every story needs a protagonist. Most audiences would have a hard time identifying with an ice sheet or valley glacier no matter how beautiful. Instead, the documentary follows photographer James Balog on his quest to capture the response of the cryosphere to climate change, making it visually evident and compelling.

Balog became interested in photography while working on his master’s degree in geomorphology—the processes that shape landscapes. That interest blossomed into a very successful career as a photographer for the likes of National Geographic. Chasing Ice is the result of the Extreme Ice Survey project Balog started in 2007. The idea was to deploy cameras to a number of glaciers and compile high-quality, time-lapse imagery over long enough time periods to clearly see the glaciers melting back.

The reality, unsurprisingly, was this was a daunting challenge that would push the physical limitations of the equipment and the resolve of Balog’s team. In the end, the project has produced (and continues to produce) stunning and extraordinary visuals that drive home the reality of glacial melt trends that would otherwise be represented by data points on a graph. Balog has been sharing that work for several years, including through a 2009 TED presentation, but the medium of film brings it to life with an intensity that public talks can’t match.

It should go without saying that the cinematography is gorgeous, and Chasing Ice is certainly a feast for the eyes. It’s worth watching just to see these remote and unfamiliar places in all their severe, crisp beauty. But the enduring impact of the film comes from seeing the ice disintegrate and disappear before your eyes. With help from a melancholy soundtrack, those scenes really get you in the gut. If you doubt that a nature documentary devoid of any fuzzy mammals can still be a tear-jerker, you may be surprised.

There’s awe, as well, and nearly unfathomable scale—like video of a slab of ice the size of lower Manhattan (and thicker than those skyscrapers are tall) breaking off Greenland’s Jakobshavn glacier. I haven’t met the sentence that can truly describe what that looks like.

The science is delivered in brief interludes through snippets of interviews with researchers. The explanations are brief and concise, running no risk of losing the audience’s attention, yet the film still manages to avoid overgeneralizing or glossing over important caveats. Those who were turned off by the sometimes sensationalist tone of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth will find no quarrel with Chasing Ice.

Political hot buttons and polarizing figures are absent, apart from a few television clips of bloviating pundits (and Senator James Inhofe’s infamous description of climate change as a hoax). Balog uses these as counterpoint to his team's tireless drive to show the reality playing out before his cameras.

The film does a terrific job all-around of reaching out to those with doubts about climate science, rather than merely preaching to the choir. Balog briefly describes his initial skepticism of climate change and how the science changed his mind. There’s even an interesting interview with a spokesman for insurance giant Munich Re about rising disaster costs, which the company has concluded is at least partly due to climate change. A widely-circulated video of one audience member’s remarkable change of heart after watching the film testifies to its potency as a work of science communication.

If you have any interest in the beautiful, frigid landscapes of Greenland, Alaska, and Iceland, or even if you suspect that the media has exaggerated the magnitude of the changes to the cryosphere, Chasing Ice is an experience you should take in. And then share.

There’s awe, as well, and nearly unfathomable scale—like video of a slab of ice the size of lower Manhattan (and thicker than those skyscrapers are tall) breaking off Greenland’s Jakobshavn glacier. I haven’t met the sentence that can truly describe what that looks like.

I saw this recently at a local theater and I must say it was one of the best documentaries I've seen in a while. Visually stunning, well informed and very entertaining. They do briefly cover the expanding glaciers as well. I would have never thought a film could personify ice so well.

This is how you talk about climate change. No sensationalizing. Hardcore pictures, with discussion of environmental changes that could have caused this. Touch on the local changes that have happened, and figure out how these fit into global climate change - because there's always a local reason (local temp rise, local precip decline, local cloud change).

I also saw it on the big screen this last week - awesome, sobering. When I was in college I worked at a climbing school during the summers - I spent a lot of time on the (even then) rapidly disappearing Sierra glaciers. Watching the time-lapse of the collapse of the valley glaciers was especially poignant - my wife said it was like watching the death throes of the Ice Beings.

It's weird how the whole issue has become political - when all you have to do is put on your hiking boots and go look, or a few days ago watch the high tides flood the low-lying roads and parking lots around the bay area - on a clear sunny morning - no storm surge needed!

There’s awe, as well, and nearly unfathomable scale—like video of a slab of ice the size of lower Manhattan (and thicker than those skyscrapers are tall) breaking off Greenland’s Jakobshavn glacier.

While this may inspire awe and be "unfathomable" to humans, where's the context for how mundane (or not) such events are on the ice shelves? How long have we been filming or otherwise measuring glaciers? 10? 20? 30 years? How do we know that this is not a common event in the ~6000 year history of the Earth?

While alien imagery and a maudlin soundtrack may hit some people emotionally, it's all too easy for right-wing pundits and other deniers to dismiss this video as another piece of sensationalist propaganda. It took me just a few seconds to construct the above Fox News-like 'question? question? question?' argument against the iceberg calving that is apparently "unfathomable".

That's why....

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Those who were turned off by the sometimes sensationalist tone of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth will find no quarrel with Chasing Ice.

I highly doubt this. This movie will change nothing about polarized opinions on climate change.

I'd rather live under a retreating glacier than an advancing one, but I think both would provide compelling cinematic experiences.

Yes, the (very small) number of expanding glaciers are discussed. Of course, there are more terms in the mass budget than just melt- like snowfall.

Hopefully you're aware that we know quite a bit more about the behavior of glaciers than "They used to be bigger during the ice age, now they're smaller."

I'd be interested in the story of glaciers that have both advanced significantly and then retreated all within recorded history.

I once saw an exhibition in the Fernsehturm in Berlin that showed comparison photographs of some alpine glaciers, with the first photograph usually being from the early 20th century and the second from the last 20th century. No surprise, in every case the glacier had retreated significantly in the intervening time.

But more interesting than that were the descriptions taken from historical records which made it clear that most of these same glaciers had spent the 18th and 19th centuries advancing and the late 20th century retreat had actually just returned them to the size they had been in the 17th century.

In particular there were cases where whole villages had been swallowed by the glacier in the past and now, after about 200 years, the site of the village was again free of ice.

There is a fundamental conflict between reports of accelerating land based ice loss and sea altimeter readings which show no acceleration over the past two decades. Where is the melt going? A void in the space time continuum?

Melt rates are notoriously difficult to measure. Which number are you going to trust more?

There's an interesting hypothesis I read in New Scientist a few years ago that a warmer moister world on account of AGW could result in falling sea levels. This runs contrary to conventional wisdom about rising sea levels. The reason is that the Antarctic high altitude ice sheet behaviour will totally dominate sea level effects. If more precipitation at high Antarctic altitude increases snowfall forming ice at the top faster than it slides downhill, more of the water on the planet gets locked up there. There isn't going to be much melt above 1000metres due to it being so cold there that a few degrees warming isn't going to make any difference at high altitude. The question which determines whether sea levels rise or fall concerns whether coastal melting effects cause greater downwards slip, compared to increased precipitation at the top of the glaciers.

The only reason politics is involved is because the damage is a result of pollutants, primarily released into the environment by large industrial concerns. These are the same people who looted our economy to satisfy their own greed and couldn't care less what happens to everyone else. They own the media and have the power to control what's being disseminated, and the relative minority of hard core conservatives, who'll eagerly jump to a position that is completely unsupportable scientifically, accept it without question. What I'd like to ask them is what if they're wrong. Would they admit it after it's too late to reverse any of the long-term consequences of their willful ignorance?

I've been hearing about damage to the atmosphere and global warming for most of my life (I'm 56). The first people I know of that sounded the alarm were NASA scientists. Living in Florida, I've known a few of the NASA engineer types, and they're hardly "fanatical environmentalists". They're SCIENTISTS. They believe in what can be demonstrated scientifically. There's no "right" or "left" to it, it's simply what the scientific evidence leads them to conclude. I wonder why it's so hard for some people to get that through their heads . . .

It's not getting it into their heads. It's making the sacrifice that solving the problem calls for. If it didn't call for changing our behavior and/or making ourselves less comfortable - or cost money or profits from the very rich - there would be no quarrel at all.

People resist it because it says uncomfortable things about the way we've been living. Nobody likes admitting they're wrong.

I also saw it on the big screen this last week - awesome, sobering. When I was in college I worked at a climbing school during the summers - I spent a lot of time on the (even then) rapidly disappearing Sierra glaciers. Watching the time-lapse of the collapse of the valley glaciers was especially poignant - my wife said it was like watching the death throes of the Ice Beings.

It's weird how the whole issue has become political - when all you have to do is put on your hiking boots and go look, or a few days ago watch the high tides flood the low-lying roads and parking lots around the bay area - on a clear sunny morning - no storm surge needed!

We should always bear in mind though that the unnecessary politicization comes from all sides. I've always enjoyed watching nature films, and footage like the glacier photography presented here is beautiful and poignant--but these days a great many nature docs aren't even subtle about having political aims, and selectively present facts to further them.* When we still haven't reached the midpoint of our current interglacial and places like Hawaii were glaciated a mere 14,500 years ago, substantial ice retreat would be happening even without our contribution; we're accelerating it significantly, to be sure, but it's a lot more complicated than any of the standard politicking considers. I fear the biggest losers in all this politicization are the average folks out in the general public, who are being systematically polarized through selective presentation of information by all sides.

* : I'm not saying that this doc is one of them; I've only seen the gorgeous trailers and not the whole film.

It's not getting it into their heads. It's making the sacrifice that solving the problem calls for. If it didn't call for changing our behavior and/or making ourselves less comfortable - or cost money or profits from the very rich - there would be no quarrel at all.

People resist it because it says uncomfortable things about the way we've been living. Nobody likes admitting they're wrong.

"Wrong" is a perfectly cromulent word to use. I always find it interesting when people present unqualified value judgments as if they're self-evident universal truths rather than parochially conditioned upon one's specific worldviews and priorities. Most people do it--and unsurprisingly, most people don't even realize they're doing it.

The "right" or "wrong" things to do about issues like greenhouse gas emissions are entirely dependent upon our goals--for example, the type of natural world, technological civilization, human society, and lifestyle we want to have in the future--and what compromises and opportunity costs we're willing to tolerate to achieve those goals.

You may value a very high level of status-quo natural world preservation, and be willing to delay or not reach a lot of technological and social advances in order to keep the natural world as close as possible to how it exists today. I on the other hand may value technological and social advances more highly, and be willing to allow more change in the natural world in order to reach these advances more quickly and perhaps make further technological and social progress more likely. Neither position is "right" or "wrong;" they just involve different relative valuations of certain commodities, and different tolerances for various opportunity costs.

These issues are only made more complicated by the political biases, subconscious or overt, which often creep into our prognostications related to such subjects. I recall reading a McKinsey report on the economics of taxing carbon which concluded it would be a net economic benefit in the mid-term--but the report buried in the footnotes half a dozen very costly and largely unknown factors which it didn't include in its calculations, nor did it take into account the trajectory towards renewables which we're already on thanks to technological innovation, decreasing costs, and better economies of scale in those areas.

In any event, it's just not as simple as some inherent "right" and "wrong"--it's a complex calculation about what we value in the world and which compromises we're each willing to make. And it doesn't help that when we're making that calculation, we're relying on very imperfect information often provided by (thus potentially biased by) people whose views are simplistic enough as to think it's all black-and-white, right-and-wrong.

It's not getting it into their heads. It's making the sacrifice that solving the problem calls for. If it didn't call for changing our behavior and/or making ourselves less comfortable - or cost money or profits from the very rich - there would be no quarrel at all.

People resist it because it says uncomfortable things about the way we've been living. Nobody likes admitting they're wrong.

"Wrong" is a perfectly cromulent word to use. I always find it interesting when people present unqualified value judgments as if they're self-evident universal truths rather than parochially conditioned upon one's specific worldviews and priorities. Most people do it--and unsurprisingly, most people don't even realize they're doing it.

The "right" or "wrong" things to do about issues like greenhouse gas emissions are entirely dependent upon our goals--for example, the type of natural world, technological civilization, human society, and lifestyle we want to have in the future--and what compromises and opportunity costs we're willing to tolerate to achieve those goals.

You may value a very high level of status-quo natural world preservation, and be willing to delay or not reach a lot of technological and social advances in order to keep the natural world as close as possible to how it exists today. I on the other hand may value technological and social advances more highly, and be willing to allow more change in the natural world in order to reach these advances more quickly and perhaps make further technological and social progress more likely. Neither position is "right" or "wrong;" they just involve different relative valuations of certain commodities, and different tolerances for various opportunity costs.

These issues are only made more complicated by the political biases, subconscious or overt, which often creep into our prognostications related to such subjects. I recall reading a McKinsey report on the economics of taxing carbon which concluded it would be a net economic benefit in the mid-term--but the report buried in the footnotes half a dozen very costly and largely unknown factors which it didn't include in its calculations, nor did it take into account the trajectory towards renewables which we're already on thanks to technological innovation, decreasing costs, and better economies of scale in those areas.

In any event, it's just not as simple as some inherent "right" and "wrong"--it's a complex calculation about what we value in the world and which compromises we're each willing to make. And it doesn't help that when we're making that calculation, we're relying on very imperfect information often provided by (thus potentially biased by) people whose views are simplistic enough as to think it's all black-and-white, right-and-wrong.

Yea, I'm not a lover of the black or white "right" or "wrong" thing either. But... here goes: preserving our envruronment is "right" and has ABSOLOUTLY NOTHING to do with delaying scientific or societal progress. I just can't understand how if we weren't throwing shit-tonnes of CO2 into the air this would prevent all these universities and companies from developing technologies. I can guarantee getting a university education is solely based on intellectual ability, value you and your surrounding society places on getting one, and affordability (again a personal/societial thing--societies that believe in it more make it easier to get into via cost lowering/subsidizing school).

Societies placing restrictions on a creating a disposable culture may cause price increases, although economic reforms could help curtail some of this. And, I'm sorry, I just plain disagree that society has advanced all that much is the US. Rampant corruption, religious nutcases having strong political influence, mass obesity. Sorry, that's a society in decline.

Nothing of the above that you wrote proves that technological or social advancement requires rape of our world. There are ways of living that we haven't even thought of yet.

So, yes, I'm unwilling to ruin this world as we know it for cheap electronics, because that is all we are getting with the way our world works now.

What you and so many other poor souls don't get is that we can have our cake and eat it too. I.e.: we can have technological and (true) societal advancement, and live in a clean, healthier, and well conserved world.

I once saw an exhibition in the Fernsehturm in Berlin that showed comparison photographs of some alpine glaciers, with the first photograph usually being from the early 20th century and the second from the last 20th century. No surprise, in every case the glacier had retreated significantly in the intervening time.

But more interesting than that were the descriptions taken from historical records which made it clear that most of these same glaciers had spent the 18th and 19th centuries advancing and the late 20th century retreat had actually just returned them to the size they had been in the 17th century.

In particular there were cases where whole villages had been swallowed by the glacier in the past and now, after about 200 years, the site of the village was again free of ice.

Indeed; and in mediaeval Europe the advancing glaciers which could swallow once-green towns were often considered either the work of the Devil, or considered God's judgment on the sinful (like Sodom and Gomorrah). There's at least one recorded case of a priest exorcising a glacier, in order to cast out the demon responsible for its menacing growth.

Speaking of interesting climate phenomena, I'm fascinated by things like the "Early Anthropocene" hypothesis. It could be entirely incorrect, but that hypothesis explains the relative temperature stability* of the Holocene as a byproduct of human agricultural activity--clearing grasslands and forests to plant crops, keeping ever-larger domestic herds, etc. And when we begin to think of human activities which may or may not have impacted the environment significantly, our role in the decline of megafauna and key predators is an even earlier possible point of impact--altering whole ecosystems, if that is indeed what our ancestors did, could potentially impact climate in interesting ways. It's food for thought, even though it's largely hypothesis and speculation.

It's not getting it into their heads. It's making the sacrifice that solving the problem calls for. If it didn't call for changing our behavior and/or making ourselves less comfortable - or cost money or profits from the very rich - there would be no quarrel at all.

People resist it because it says uncomfortable things about the way we've been living. Nobody likes admitting they're wrong.

"Wrong" is a perfectly cromulent word to use. I always find it interesting when people present unqualified value judgments as if they're self-evident universal truths rather than parochially conditioned upon one's specific worldviews and priorities. Most people do it--and unsurprisingly, most people don't even realize they're doing it.

The "right" or "wrong" things to do about issues like greenhouse gas emissions are entirely dependent upon our goals--for example, the type of natural world, technological civilization, human society, and lifestyle we want to have in the future--and what compromises and opportunity costs we're willing to tolerate to achieve those goals.

You may value a very high level of status-quo natural world preservation, and be willing to delay or not reach a lot of technological and social advances in order to keep the natural world as close as possible to how it exists today. I on the other hand may value technological and social advances more highly, and be willing to allow more change in the natural world in order to reach these advances more quickly and perhaps make further technological and social progress more likely. Neither position is "right" or "wrong;" they just involve different relative valuations of certain commodities, and different tolerances for various opportunity costs.

These issues are only made more complicated by the political biases, subconscious or overt, which often creep into our prognostications related to such subjects. I recall reading a McKinsey report on the economics of taxing carbon which concluded it would be a net economic benefit in the mid-term--but the report buried in the footnotes half a dozen very costly and largely unknown factors which it didn't include in its calculations, nor did it take into account the trajectory towards renewables which we're already on thanks to technological innovation, decreasing costs, and better economies of scale in those areas.

In any event, it's just not as simple as some inherent "right" and "wrong"--it's a complex calculation about what we value in the world and which compromises we're each willing to make. And it doesn't help that when we're making that calculation, we're relying on very imperfect information often provided by (thus potentially biased by) people whose views are simplistic enough as to think it's all black-and-white, right-and-wrong.

Yea, I'm not a lover of the black or white "right" or "wrong" thing either. But... here goes: preserving our envruronment is "right" and has ABSOLOUTLY NOTHING to do with delaying scientific or societal progress. I just can't understand how if we weren't throwing shit-tonnes of CO2 into the air this would prevent all these universities and companies from developing technologies. I can guarantee getting a university education is solely based on intellectual ability, value you and your surrounding society places on getting one, and affordability (again a personal/societial thing--societies that believe in it more make it easier to get into via cost lowering/subsidizing school).

Societies placing restrictions on a creating a disposable culture may cause price increases, although economic reforms could help curtail some of this. And, I'm sorry, I just plain disagree that society has advanced all that much is the US. Rampant corruption, religious nutcases having strong political influence, mass obesity. Sorry, that's a society in decline.

Nothing of the above that you wrote proves that technological or social advancement requires rape of our world. There are ways of living that we haven't even thought of yet.

So, yes, I'm unwilling to ruin this world as we know it for cheap electronics, because that is all we are getting with the way our world works now.

What you and so many other poor souls don't get is that we can have our cake and eat it too. I.e.: we can have technological and (true) societal advancement, and live in a clean, healthier, and well conserved world.

This is false. Perhaps you haven't done the math, but look at the percentage of energy that comes from fossil fuels. Not just electricity, but all of our energy. Renewables are no where near even being a primary source, let alone a replacement for our energy needs.

If we wanted to actually meet the CO2 targets to reverse anything, we would need to do massive damage to our economy. You try to hide this by implying that it just means no cheap electronics, but it also means food becoming prohibitively expensive to the point where we would have starvation problems. Don't try to argue the balanced approach, because it just means vanity reductions in CO2 that ultimately don't help.

It ultimately comes down to whether or not you want to destroy lifestyles of the people alive now to potentially protect the lifestyles of people 50 years from now. So no, we can't "have our cake and eat it".

Yea, I'm not a lover of the black or white "right" or "wrong" thing either. But... here goes: preserving our envruronment is "right" and has ABSOLOUTLY NOTHING to do with delaying scientific or societal progress.

But we're not "preserving the environment" by undertaking or rejecting any of the efforts being debated--it will continue either way. We may be trying to "preserve the arbitrary status quo in the environment," but that's a different proposition and one we should have honest deliberation about. One problem is that many people seem to be uncritically and irrationally in favor of any and every effort (at any and every expense) to preserve the (arguably arbitrary) environmental status quo. My favorite irrationality in this respect is when environmentalists list certain human-introduced species as "endangered species" to be protected at all costs in the non-native environment we introduced them to a century or more ago, and yet list other human-introduced species as "invasive species" to be eradicated at all costs in the non-native environment we introduced them to (usually more recently). This is often (not always) little more than acting on irrational sentiment rather than on reason.

But again, this is an area where we bring our cultural baggage and value judgments to bear--it may not be immediately obvious, but we do. As a thought experiment: If we could wave a wand and restore any given environment to any previous state, just once, with all the flora and fauna and prevailing climate intact, would it be a "good" thing to do so, and why? Many species in any such transaction would be winners, and many losers. Some would go extinct because of our choice; others would be preserved from extinction. But fundamentally, any "good" or "bad" we would do by doing so is purely a personal human construct; the natural world doesn't care whether Australia has the environment and species which it does today or that which it did in the early Pleistocene--either one is an arbitrary starting point for forces which would be at work either way. Species come and go, bottlenecks come and go, climates change, mass extinctions come and go, and the world marches on. To arbitrarily choose the environment of the present as something especially worthy of preservation is a very human thing to do--but it's hardly an inherent universal good. It's just a choice reflecting certain value judgments and relative priorities, no more or less. That choice may have positive or negative consequences for other priorities, such as specific economic or social or quality of life considerations, and those should be analyzed and considered as well.

With climate concerns, the potential impact is very substantial and meaningful and thus serious investment in research, and real effort at deliberation and debate, is truly justified. And yet, it seems that many people aren't interested in rational deliberation and debate, but once again want to jump in quickly to preserve an arbitrary environmental status quo at any and all costs based on little more than irrational sentiment and research of mixed quality (like the McKinsey report I alluded to earlier; I should go find it when I get a chance because its flaws and assumptions are illustrative). On the other side, many people are just as uninterested in rational research, deliberation, and debate, and want to preserve an arbitrary industrial status quo at any and all costs based again on irrational sentiment and research of mixed quality. Point being, it's just not a simple matter of making "right" or "wrong" choices--and I still don't think we've even gotten to the stage of having rational discussions about the real issues. Knee-jerks involving highly insulated culturally-derived opinions from either side are still the norm. (Yes, even when they're "based on the science," because science only helps inform us about our world--it doesn't tell us about "right" and "wrong" choices to make, because those are unscientific value judgments given to us by the humanities and our own relative priorities.)

Note that I'm not saying that trying to protect the environmental status quo in any specific way is "bad;" I'm saying that doing so arbitrarily at any cost is irrational, that there are opportunity costs inherent to any action, and that there are value judgments (and judgments of relative value) at play even when it seems OBVIOUS ENOUGH TO YOU TO MAKE YOU SCREAM. Likewise, trying to protect the industrial status quo in any specific way isn't "bad;" but doing so arbitrarily at any cost is irrational, etc. I explained all the filters really at play in my earlier post.

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And, I'm sorry, I just plain disagree that society has advanced all that much is the US. Rampant corruption, religious nutcases having strong political influence, mass obesity. Sorry, that's a society in decline.

You clearly have a very limited frame of reference, then. Less than 10 years ago, it was illegal to be gay. (Well, not exactly; but kinda-almost.) I'm old enough to remember casual racism, sexism, and homophobia systematically pervading everyday culture in the U.S., with no one except a few TV talking heads ever objecting. My father is old enough to remember racially segregated facilities, laws prohibiting interracial marriage, and a time when women being anything other than homemakers, teachers, secretaries, or low-level service workers was exceedingly rare. We've made amazing social progress in just two generations. We are a society rapidly advancing.

Of course, the flip side is that all that progress is far from firmly entrenched. Without continued economic and political stability, our social, cultural, and political regression is always a possibility. I sometimes marvel at how many people take the current social, cultural, political, and economic freedom and well-being we enjoy for granted, and don't actually compare today's Western world to that of 50 years ago, a century ago, etc., to realize just how little removed from a relatively primitive state we truly are. The Romans were so scientifically and culturally advanced that we reinvented many of their achievements, such as advanced medical/surgical skills and some of their mechanical capabilities, only in the 19th century--and the status of women, gays, and minority races in the West only replicated or exceeded Roman heights more recently. 1500+ years of mixed decline and stagnation--it's happened in the West before, and it's not entirely hyperbolic to state that it can happen again. Wonders like the internet haven't yet succeeded in fundamentally altering the human condition...

I hold out some hope that we'll reach a natural plateau if progress continues, making a civilizational decline less likely; but barring the attainment of some hypothetical technological singularity, we haven't yet escaped the gravity-well which could easily drag us backward socially and culturally if economic conditions worsen for decades at a time.

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Nothing of the above that you wrote proves that technological or social advancement requires rape of our world. There are ways of living that we haven't even thought of yet.

Of course there are; and we'll need to think of them before they can be of any use. Less flippantly--when you set out to build a newer, bigger, better bridge, it's usually more advisable to leave the current one there and keep using it while you build the new one nearby instead of tearing down the old bridge first and getting stuck until the new one is complete. I happen to see that we're making remarkable progress building our new bridge of clean, renewable energy; I wish we would take reasonable and moderate measures to do so faster--such as investing in a smart grid infrastructure, and implementing gently escalating efficiency standards for everything from automobiles to new homes and businesses and factories. Even a revenue-neutral Fee-and-Dividend price on carbon (which would have the secondary benefit of reducing income inequality) would perhaps be a rational way to push us toward building our new bridge faster. Where I start to question the rationality of proposals is when they concentrate on tearing down our old bridge sooner, rather than on building our new one faster.

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So, yes, I'm unwilling to ruin this world as we know it for cheap electronics, because that is all we are getting with the way our world works now.

I care far more about the remarkable and consistent increase in social equality and freedom we've enjoyed over the past century or so, than I do about cheap electronics. If you see the latter but not the former, you're probably not in a position to make rational choices about our future directions.

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What you and so many other poor souls don't get is that we can have our cake and eat it too. I.e.: we can have technological and (true) societal advancement, and live in a clean, healthier, and well conserved world.

Of course we can; but doing so requires a balancing of priorities, and many compromises. If we have 100% environmental conservation we can't also have 100% technological advancement and 100% social and economic advancement--and it's not unexpected that in choosing the right balance some people will favor certain factors over others. There's much reasonable debate to be had, especially when it gets down to specifics rather than these general outlines.

There’s awe, as well, and nearly unfathomable scale—like video of a slab of ice the size of lower Manhattan (and thicker than those skyscrapers are tall) breaking off Greenland’s Jakobshavn glacier.

While this may inspire awe and be "unfathomable" to humans, where's the context for how mundane (or not) such events are on the ice shelves? How long have we been filming or otherwise measuring glaciers? 10? 20? 30 years? How do we know that this is not a common event in the ~6000 year history of the Earth?

While alien imagery and a maudlin soundtrack may hit some people emotionally, it's all too easy for right-wing pundits and other deniers to dismiss this video as another piece of sensationalist propaganda. It took me just a few seconds to construct the above Fox News-like 'question? question? question?' argument against the iceberg calving that is apparently "unfathomable".

That's why....

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Those who were turned off by the sometimes sensationalist tone of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth will find no quarrel with Chasing Ice.

I highly doubt this. This movie will change nothing about polarized opinions on climate change.

Maybe, you know, just realize that the history of the glacier is written in the ice layers? You dont need to film the glacier from its birth to know how old it is.

If we wanted to actually meet the CO2 targets to reverse anything, we would need to do massive damage to our economy.

I always like to think about it like this: Say I have $100. I can pay someone $50 to mine some coal, burn it in a powerplant and provide me electricity. With the other $50 I pay someone to make a movie for me to see. Now as an alternative, I could also pay two guys $100 to build me a wind turbine. The wind turbine provides electricity and a clean conscience. What is the difference to the economy? In both cases I spend my $100, and in both cases two people have a job.

"With high-altitude mountains in Himachal Pradesh experiencing up to 100 cm fresh snowfall in November month after 10 years, the abundance of snow on mountains has rejuvenated nearly one thousand Himalayan glaciers and has ensured uninterrupted supply of water for drinking, irrigation and hydel projects. While scanty snowfall and rising temperature in the last decade had sparked the possibilities of fast shrinking of glaciers, good spells of snowfall in last three years have changed the trend with glaciers almost growing to their original size". –Suresh Sharma, The Times of India, 3 December 2012

"With high-altitude mountains in Himachal Pradesh experiencing up to 100 cm fresh snowfall in November month after 10 years, the abundance of snow on mountains has rejuvenated nearly one thousand Himalayan glaciers and has ensured uninterrupted supply of water for drinking, irrigation and hydel projects. While scanty snowfall and rising temperature in the last decade had sparked the possibilities of fast shrinking of glaciers, good spells of snowfall in last three years have changed the trend with glaciers almost growing to their original size". –Suresh Sharma, The Times of India, 3 December 2012

The (laughably) small amount of glacier ice that is increasing is covered in the film. It in no way approaches the massive amount of glaciers that are retreating or the massively accelerated rate that they have been doing so in the past 10 years.

Continue to cherry pick data to support your ideology, though. Good job.

Sorry guys but this simply isn't going to change much of anyone's mind. I'm a supporter of the effort but this is nothing more than preaching to the choir. For me it lacked in virtually every area I'd hoped it would excel. It didn't provide very much in the way of the big draw--the time-lapse imagery. There was surprisingly little of it. Great shots to sell you on the beauty of the area? Yes, there were some, but far less than I would have expected.

I also feel like Balog came off very badly here. He looked, to me, to enjoy the limelight and it seemed evident that the director felt more than compelled to cover HIS story more than THE story. I can say this in part because we saw it in Philly where the director came along and answered questions at its conclusion.

It resonated with 100% of those who are already sold on this issue. However, it answered virtually none of the questions doubters have. It said almost nothing about us being the cause. It said nothing about solutions. It makes assumptions that everyone agrees on key points that the doubters do NOT agree on.

If you see this and imagine yourself as a doubter suddenly this effort comes off very weak. I applaud the effort but it isn't going to change minds.

My... my sides! I just don't know what to make of this comment, especially have just finished an exam on reconstructing past climate (and one about dating (geochronology) a week ago). Just... just... NO!

As for the film, I'll watch it if I can find time. The trailer does make look a little sensationalist, but then again it is a trailer and who doesn't like some entertainment?

Sorry guys but this simply isn't going to change much of anyone's mind...

It resonated with 100% of those who are already sold on this issue. However, it answered virtually none of the questions doubters have. It said almost nothing about us being the cause. It said nothing about solutions. It makes assumptions that everyone agrees on key points that the doubters do NOT agree on.

If you see this and imagine yourself as a doubter suddenly this effort comes off very weak. I applaud the effort but it isn't going to change minds.

Then it sounds like a great nature documentary, rather than a propaganda piece. Perhaps it will resonate with people more than you realize, then, because what many people "on the other side" of the issue are most annoyed with and tune out immediately are the propaganda pieces masquerading as films, the actors masquerading as climate and economics experts, etc. Make a straightforward film about something beautiful quickly disappearing, though, and you might actually inspire people to think about how we can keep it around a little longer.

If we wanted to actually meet the CO2 targets to reverse anything, we would need to do massive damage to our economy.

I always like to think about it like this: Say I have $100. I can pay someone $50 to mine some coal, burn it in a powerplant and provide me electricity. With the other $50 I pay someone to make a movie for me to see. Now as an alternative, I could also pay two guys $100 to build me a wind turbine. The wind turbine provides electricity and a clean conscience. What is the difference to the economy? In both cases I spend my $100, and in both cases two people have a job.

I just don't see how the economy can be damaged in this way.

If it were that simple few would object. However, the complexities are legion.

First off, not everyone shares your priorities; so to get others to spend their money the way you want, you'd have to substitute a command economy for our free market economy--or at least do essentially the same thing on a smaller scale by otherwise redirecting the resources by fiat in accordance with your will and against the will of others. Given the high level of objection raised when we redirect comparatively small amounts of resources towards companies like Solyndra, what do you think would happen if we redirected large enough amounts of resources to really make a difference in the trajectory of green energy development?

In redirecting resources by fiat, you necessarily take them away from the myriad panem et circenses programs, both governmental and in private industry, which keep the general population mollified. You may be content to "give up your movie for a wind turbine," but the millions of people sitting outside the proverbial theater with no show and nothing to eat may have other ideas and cause additional complications. If their dissatisfaction grows large enough it can even disrupt the overall economy and you'll end up with half a wind turbine and not enough will or resources to finish the other half any time soon, plus a dangerously disenfranchised, angry, and self-destructive populace--whereas if you'd left the economy to its own devices it may even have built your wind turbine sooner.

Many of the proposals to "put a price on carbon" (except for Fee-and-Dividend) are especially dangerous in this regard, as they'd raise the prices of foodstuffs and almost every consumer good in a very regressive way; to offset this, they often propose byzantine methods of reimbursement which would serve to make the people even more dependent upon government-financed panem et circenses.

And of course that's all very general--as was your post--but I think it's enough to adequately express that many people just see the issues regarding fossil fuel use and green energy development as complex and intertwined with economic and social issues. The "don't tear down your existing bridge until you've built the new one" analogy I used in a post above is a gross simplification, but I think it resonates.

It's not scheduled to appear in Canberra anytime soon (where incidentally, Australian policy makers converge to debate such issues, and decide [or is it compromise?] the nation's future direction), so I guess I'll just have to wait for it to appear on BitTorrent. A bit sad really.

I would have loved to see this on the big screen but it isn't showing anywhere in my state (Georgia) from what I could find. What the heck.

Sucks, doesn't it? You'd think it'd at least be showing in Atlanta, Columbia, Charlotte, or some of the major cities in Georgia and the Carolinas. But nope! Unfortunately this is more common with documentaries.

If we wanted to actually meet the CO2 targets to reverse anything, we would need to do massive damage to our economy.

I always like to think about it like this: Say I have $100. I can pay someone $50 to mine some coal, burn it in a powerplant and provide me electricity. With the other $50 I pay someone to make a movie for me to see. Now as an alternative, I could also pay two guys $100 to build me a wind turbine. The wind turbine provides electricity and a clean conscience. What is the difference to the economy? In both cases I spend my $100, and in both cases two people have a job.

This is not right, in the first case you've spent $100, in the second case you've spent $200. EDIT: <your wording is rather ambiguous, I read "also pay two guys $100 to build me a wind turbine" as paying each $100, but upon rereading you could also mean pay them $50 each.>

In the first case, those coal miners are full-time employees, after the coal you originally purchased is burned, you need to buy more. In the second case, after the turbines are built, both workers are unemployed, and indeed, most of the 'green' jobs are temporary construction jobs with contract labor for maintenance and repair.

They are night and day insofar as the economy is concerned.

Quote:

I just don't see how the economy can be damaged in this way.

And that's why things slowly getting FUBAR.

Do you see offshore jobs being the same as local jobs in the context of the local economy as well?

My... my sides! I just don't know what to make of this comment, especially have just finished an exam on reconstructing past climate (and one about dating (geochronology) a week ago). Just... just... NO!

It'll help you know what to make of the comment if you read past the first paragraph.

News flash: when a glacier grows, it "calves" into the sea. When it shrinks, it quietly melts and retreats. So watching a glacier shed into the sea is watching it GROW!! But it impresses the ignorant, and hence is favoured by shysters like Gore and Balog.

News flash: when a glacier grows, it "calves" into the sea. When it shrinks, it quietly melts and retreats. So watching a glacier shed into the sea is watching it GROW!! But it impresses the ignorant, and hence is favoured by shysters like Gore and Balog.

When a glacier FLOWS, it calves into the sea. As all marine-terminating glaciers do... If calving/melting exceeds snowfall, it shrinks. If snowfall is greater, it grows.

And what causes flowing? A shrinking glacier does not flow, it just fades away. Anyhoo, it's all irrelevant. When Capt. Vancouver first saw Prince William Sound, it was full of ice. As the Little Ice Age faded, so did glaciers. Hooray! More warming = more life. More cooling = more death.

Growth isn't the only thing that drives flow, and flow isn't the only thing that drives calving. A quick trip to Wikipedia can illuminate the causes of calving.

Quote:

It is useful to classify causes of calving into first, second, and third order processes.[8] First order processes are responsible for the overall rate of calving at the glacier scale. The first order cause of calving is longitudinal stretching, which controls the formation of crevasses. When crevasses penetrate the full thickness of the ice, calving will occur.[9] Longitudinal stretching is controlled by friction at the base and edges of the glacier, glacier geometry and water pressure at the bed. These factors, therefore, exert the primary control on calving rate.

Second and third order calving processes can be considered to be superimposed on the first order process above, and control the occurrence of individual calving events, rather than the overall rate. Melting at the waterline is an important second order calving process as it undercuts the subaerial ice, leading to collapse. Other second order processes include tidal and seismic events, buoyant forces and melt water wedging.

When calving occurs due to waterline melting, only the subaerial part of the glacier will calve, leaving a submerged 'foot'. Thus, a third order process is defined, whereby upward buoyant forces cause this ice foot to break off and emerge at the surface. This process is extremely dangerous, as it has been known to occur, without warning, up to 300m from the glacier terminus.[10]

They also have a more involved article on ice-sheet dynamics that covers flow and a multitude of other factors which play into the evolution of a glacier.